While it may be tempting, measuring how many people open your emails is a fairly unreliable and irrelevant metric and doesn’t tell you much about the success of your email campaign.
The more important metric to be paying attention to? Click through rate.
Measuring and analyzing the number of people who clicked onto, and through, your site as a result of your emails can tell your business a lot about what’s working and what’s not. Higher click through rates lead to real sales are signs of well-segmented email lists, better subject lines, more engaging content, more effective calls to action, and so much more.
Here are some tips to increase your click through rates, so you can start improving that essential email marketing metric:
Stop Sending Out Spam
You may not think you’re coming off as spammy, but if your emails are getting sent to the spam box (or deleted by their recipeints), they’re not doing your business any good. Avoid this by making sure you send only what your audience would see as relevant information, with a frequency that they would find appropriate. Generally speaking: not decades apart, but not exactly every day either.
Segment Your Email Lists
Don’t send out automated emails, or even generalized ones. Segmenting your email list means you’re targeting a specific audience with a specific message relevant to them. This kind of attention to detail means your customers will actually appreciate the emails they receive, increasing the likelihood they will open them, read them, and click through to your site.
Be Personable
Whether it’s with educational information, humor, candidness, or something else entirely—if you want to promote your business, you need to come off more like a person and less like a brand. Surprise your readers by writing something genuine, something stimulating, something you would find interesting.
Write Engaging Content
Quality content isn’t just king for SEO. It’s important when you want to engage an audience and it’s essential if you want to provide a positive user-experience whenever a lead or customer interacts with your emails (hint: you definitely do). Your email may get opened, maybe even skimmed, but in order to boost your click through rate, you need to have content that customers want to read.
Include Strong Calls to Action
You don’t just want your emails to get read, although that’s obviously an important starting point and a good goal to accomplish. Ultimately though, getting customers to your site and boosting conversion are the ultimate goals, so motivate them to act with effective calls to action and relevant backlinks.
Incorporate Multimedia
Photos and videos are more likely to get seen and get clicked. They have the power to peak interest and drive traffic in ways written content alone simply can’t.